Edith Windsor, Gay Marriage Icon and Activist, Dies at 88

Edie Windsor joining Mayor de Blasio at Stonewall Tavern for its formal recognition as a National Monument in 2016.

By Andy Katz/Pacific Press/LightRocket/Getty Images.

Edith Windsor, whose efforts to reclaim $363,000 in estate taxes led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling that paved the way for legalized gay marriage, died on Tuesday in New York City. She was 88 years old. Her death was confirmed to The New York Times by her wife, Judith Kasen-Windsor, whom she married in 2016.

Windsor, who worked as a computer programmer before devoting herself to L.G.B.T. activism, had spent much of her life with Thea Spyer, whom she married in Canada in 2007. When Spyer, who had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1977, died in 2009, Windsor was deemed ineligible by the Internal Revenue Service for the unlimited spousal exemption from federal estate taxes. Windsor sued, and in siding with her the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, which Windsor said “unconstitutionally singled out same-sex marriage partners for ‘differential treatment.’”

The day that Windsor won her Supreme Court case, President Obama gave this speech outside the White House:

It would be two years before, in their ruling on Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court made same-sex marriage legal across the United States. But Windsor, who had just turned 84 when the Supreme Court ruled in her favor, became an icon for gay marriage activists. She was the grand marshal of the New York City Pride Parade that year and, per the Times, a runner-up alongside Pope Francis for Time magazine’s Person of the Year. She told The New Yorker’s Ariel Levy in a 2013 profile, “I don’t know how to say it that’s not corny as hell—I’ve been having a love affair with the gay community. I got a million letters. I think Thea would love it.”

Until her death, Windsor did not stop her advocacy for L.G.B.T.Q. rights, which became her full-time career after she quit her job as a senior systems programmer at I.B.M. in 1975. Even when Spyer’s health continued to decline in the early 2000s, Windsor remained committed to furthering the rights of L.G.B.TQ. Americans.

“Married is a magic word,” Ms. Windsor said at a rally outside City Hall in New York just days before Spyer’s death in 2009. “And it is magic throughout the world. It has to do with our dignity as human beings, to be who we are openly.”

Though same-sex marriage was in the American history books by 2015, the community did not stop honoring the longtime Greenwich Village resident for her work. In June of this year she gave an impassioned speech about the power and necessity of marriage equality when the Trevor Project honored her with the Icon Award at its TrevorLIVE fund-raiser in June.

“There is no same-sex marriage in this country, there is no gay marriage in this country, there is only marriage,” she said. “So if they want to get rid of same-sex marriage, they have to go to a different country that has it.”

Get Vanity Fair’s Cocktail Hour

Our essential brief on culture, the news, and more. And it's on the house.